Interview: Mikael Lind, Viktoria

Associate Professor and Research Manager for the application division of Sustainable Transports at Viktoria Swedish ICT.

During the last year Viktoria Swedish ICT has focused a lot on Maritime Informatics. What is Maritime Informatics?

Informatics is concerned with the development and evaluation of information and communication practices with supporting technologies. Information is used both by people and systems, and Informatics studies the interaction between these. Maritime Informatics simply refers to Informatics in maritime applications, as for example in Sea Traffic Management.

What is Sea Traffic Management and in what way can it contribute to more sustainable shipping?

The aviation industry has for a long time been working with Air Traffic Management, a collection of systems designed to ensure that each flight arrives safely and on time at their destination. Sea Traffic Management is intended to translate this approach into the maritime industry and thus contribute to making shipping more efficient, safer and more profitable while reducing the environmental impact.

Why is this important?

Shipping is a very important part of global transportation, not least for Sweden with our long coastline. Considering the enormous capacity available in this transport industry, improved efficiency and environmental performance within this sector can have major global effects.

How can Viktoria Swedish ICT contribute to this development?

At Viktoria Swedish ICT we have both domain competence from the shipping industry, skills in applied research within informatics, and valuable process knowledge from our previous efforts in the aviation sector, for example from projects such as Future Airports. Through the commitment we now have in the project MonaLisa 2.0 we will be able to transfer much of this thinking to the maritime sector.